Reports of a strengthened and stable property market indicate a bright future for the building industry, but one of the biggest checks on building is the shortage of skills in the sector.
The industry continues to be shaped by ambitious infrastructure, commercial property and housing plans, such as the government’s promise to build 275,000 new homes by 2020.
The single greatest challenge in sustaining a buoyant property market is matching supply with demand - recent research from the Federation of Master Builders states that 66% of small construction businesses in the UK are turning down work because of a lack of skilled workers. So how do we recruit and retain enough people to turn industry pressures and challenges into opportunities and growth?
Encouraging and nurturing homegrown talent is a good place to start and matches up with the Local Government Authority’s call for the government to work with industry, councils and education providers to develop a strategy to increase the UK’s skilled labour market at local levels. Identifying and remedying the causes of the construction industry’s talent gap will take time, and the dynamism of the industry demands solutions that can bring more immediate results.
The ultimate goal in the UK should be to develop enough home-grown skills that firms can export their expertise. The country cannot get to that point overnight, however. It may have no option but to bring expertise to where it is needed. In the context of the UK’s labour and skills shortage, expansion means looking beyond our borders. The EU is the world’s largest economy - according to the International Monetary Fund, the EU has a nominal GDP bigger than that of the US - and given that there are skills aplenty in the EU, it makes sense to encourage labour from nations with more sluggish economic prospects.
Combining global experience with local expertise is an approach we adopt at Aecom. We operate a fully integrated model in the Europe, Middle East, Africa and India region, where employees are mobilised to work wherever their skills are needed. Teams from the UK working alongside on-the-ground colleagues deliver many of our overseas commercial and residential property projects. Innovative technology and robust processes enable this, as well as a pan-regional outlook.
As the migration debate divides opinion in the UK and EU, it also highlights the issue of greater European labour immigration - the Construction Industry Training Board’s Construction 2030 and Beyond report says while net immigration can supply the industry with hard-working skilled people, it also adds to the demand for housing. Encouraging more people from the EU to help build the UK remains a complex proposition, but it need not be to our detriment. The UK urgently needs to build new housing and improved infrastructure. For this reason alone, it is worth looking at all our options.
Collaboration between government, councils and the industry itself is needed to develop a sustainable plan that looks at the issues at the heart of the problem, such as training and incentivising apprentices, with fresh eyes.
It is also important to link what the country needs with what the market can offer. Commodities and money are currently cheap, so surely the combined might of the European property and construction sectors can rise to the challenge of marrying supply and demand.
While there is no silver bullet to solving the skills shortage, looking to the EU for help could hold some promise in bolstering the resources we need to keep the property market - and the economy - buoyant.
John Horgan is deputy chief executive, EMEA & India at Aecom
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